The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was conceived in 1929 by the
International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet a need for reliable, uniform crime statistics for the nation. (Uniform Crime Reports, 2011) At the time it was argued that among the variety of official data, not only were "offenses known" closest to the crime itself, but a more constant relationship existed between offenses committed and offenses known to the police than between offenses committed and other official data; assumptions shown to be erroneous by victimization surveys many years later. (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime
Statistics, 2011)In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those
statistics.
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At least one knows these crimes happened instead of a survey which one could be deceitful.
NATIONAL INCIDENCE BASED REPORTING SYSTEM
During the 1980s, law enforcement agencies sought to improve official reporting methods, particularly the UCR. In 1985 the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the F.B.I. released Blueprint for the Future of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. This blueprint outlined the next generation of official reporting methods, specifically the National IncidenceBased
Reporting System (NIBRS). Starting with 1991 data, the UCR program began to move to this more comprehensive reporting system. While the UCR is essentially offender-based, focusing on summary accounts of case and offender characteristics, the NIBRS is incident-based, seeking to link more expansive data elements to the crime, included in six primary categories: administrative, offense, property, victim, offender, and arrestee (Britt, Statistics: Reporting
Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011).
Unlike the UCR, which is limited to a relatively small number of F.B.I. index crimes,
NIBRS provides details on forty-six offenses. This specificity allows for more accurate
Crime data is a resource being used to help understand who the victims are, their age, race, what type of crime they have committed. The more information someone has about crime the more prepared they can be to deal with the victim, evaluate programs that help prevent crime. There are several official sources used UCR, NCVS, NIBRS that are used. There are pros and cons to each source and the following information will include some of the positive and some of the negatives points of each report. This is not inclusive by any means, there are many different various pros and cons of each report.
The FBI’s UCR Program, which began in 1929, collects information on the following crimes reported to law enforcement authorities: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. Law enforcement agencies report arrest data for 21 additional crime categories.
The Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) is constructed by the FBI on statistics of crime in the U.S. The FBI consolidates the information it receives from law enforcement officials and integrates all the information into a data that measures crime. This information is compiled by over 18,000 different agencies, from the universities to federal agencies. The information they receive is placed into two different categories, part 1 and part 2 offenses. UCR also measure crime against only women and the NCVS measures against both male and female.
US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics. n.d. 13 February 2012 .
Uniform Crime Report data has many pros, but also many cons that come with it. There are many ways of which the Uniform Crime Report can be superior to, but also inferior to victimization and self-report data studies. According to Balkan (2015), the Uniform Crime Report shows crimes reported to police departments across the nation and is a report produced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There are two offense categories in the report: part one and part two offenses. Part one offenses would be your more serious crimes such as homicides, rape, aggravated assaults, and so on. Part two offenses would be more of the property crimes such as fraud, simple assaults, and drug abuse. The Uniform Crime Report does an excellent job presenting the numbers in terms of the part one offenses, however, there are some cons that come with the Uniform Crime
Weatherburn, D. (2011) ‘Uses and abuses of crime statistics’, Contemporary Issues in Crime and Justice, 153: 1-16
We hear a lot about the crime rates going up and down from the media and they tend to expand on specific types of criminal behavior that might be of interest to the public. When politicians are running for office we are told that the crime rates are down due to the tough crime policies that they have been implemented. Citizens seek crime rates for assistance in determining if the area they reside in is safe. Some people wish to get a general idea of the crime rates for a specific neighborhood where they are thinking of purchasing a house. But what is never explained is where do the crime statistics come from and were there any factors that could have had an effect on their reliability. Crime statistics, which are created from what is reported to the police, are often unreliable. There are several influential factors that can make crime statistics both increase and decrease at any time. Most police departments, but not all, use Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) to submit their statistics to the state. Attempting to compare two police agency's crime statistics is almost impossible because not all police agencies use the UCR program for classifying crimes. UCR is a national data reporting policy that is maintained by the state and regulated by the FBI. This policy requires police agencies to report their monthly statistics by following a hierarchy scale for classifying the criminal offenses. A hierarchy scale is a list of crimes in a specific order of importance used to pick out the highest crime when there are multiple crimes committed in one incident. An example: a citizen contacts the police and makes a report of a burglary, a rape and a larceny all occurring in one incident. A...
Bureau of Justice Assistance, Police Executive Research Forum. (2012). Compstat: Its Origins, Evolution, and Future in Law Enforcement Agencies. Retrieved from http://policeforum.org/library/compstat/Compstat.pdf
Report: "2008 Crime in the United States, Expanded Homicide Data – Table 9." Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice, September 2009. http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/expanded_...
This measure of crime in America depends on reports to the police by victims of crimes. The UCR Program was developed by the FBI for the purpose of serving law enforcement as a tool for operational and administrative purposes (Steven D. Levitt, 1998, 61). The Uniform Crime Reports have both positive and negative aspects. The Uniformed Crime Reports are crucial to the determination of the amounts of crimes solved. This is important because it can help determine social tendencies pertaining to crime (Rodrigo R. Soares, 2004, 851). These crime tendencies can lead to theories about crimes that are on the rise, or crimes that are
Muller, Damon A. "Criminal Profiling ." Homicide Studies 4.3 (2000): 234-364. Web. 9 Apr 2011.
Rosen, Lawrence. “The Creation of the Uniform Crime Report: The Role of Social Science.” JSTOR. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2011.
For decades now, including the years 1994 and 1995, the time of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, American law enforcement has used two major data sources to measure crime. First, there is the Uniform Crime Report or UCR. The UCR is compiled data from reported crimes, it is a very accurate system used for murder and those crimes that cannot go unnoticed. Next, we have The National Crime Victim Survey or NCVS which is a unanimous survey, better at accounting for the crimes that may not get reported, crimes such as rape or assault.
The UCR2 allows for more detailed crime analysis, the most helpful being that it goes into more depth on the incidents that are reported to police. The UCR2 now, “adds detailed information on individual criminal incidents including victim, accused persons and incident characteristics” (Boyd, 2015). Moreover, UCR2 allows up to four different types of offences committed in one incident, to be reflected in the report, which better shows the different types of offences that occur, whereas in the UCR only the most severe crime was reflected, for example if there was a theft followed by a homicide then the homicide would most likely only be reported. Finally, the category of violent crimes and property crimes was broadened and new crimes were included in these two categories.
Federal Bureau of Investigaiton. (2010, December 22). Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January –June, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjs/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s./2010/preliminary-crime-in-the-us-2009